In-person prevention education curricula

In-person prevention programs that focus on working with small groups of participants and building their awareness and skills about sexual violence using a bystander framework are the type of bystander focused prevention that has been around the longest. Initially developed by Jackson Katz and the Mentors in Violence Prevention Program using a social justice approach, many versions of such programs now exist. Unfortunately to date evaluation research on these programs has not kept pace with their development. This has begun to change and increasing numbers of program evaluations are appearing in the published literature. Here are a few examples of programs:

2. Bringing in the Bystander - University of New Hampshire www.unh.edu/preventioninnovations Evaluations with college students have been conducted. Program changes attitudes and increases prosocial bystander behavior.

A key aspect of community education is community relevance. Thus, many individual communities have been adapting components of these and other programs to create their own bystander education. Share your examples here - what aspects are unique to your community? What might be the common factors?

Sure - as I mentioned, this was not supposed to be even close to a comprehsive list...just to get people sending links to the work that they are doing so glad you wrote in about this so that people can make the link.

We have created a resource page about Bystander Intervention programs and resources that we hope to add to after the forum. One from our list is the Green Dot campaign.
The "Green Dot" Campaign is a social norms program that the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga adopted to demonstrate their commitment to making campus safe for all students, faculty and staff. The "Green Dot" campaign raises community awareness about acts of violence against women ("red dots") as well as promotes positive behaviors to foster bystander intervention ("green dots"). For more information view UTC's Power Point on the topic.

Would you be willing to post some of the stuff you've been reading on peer educator effectiveness in the resources room topic? I'd like to read some more about it.
I was a peer educator in college, and I really enjoyed the work that we did. It was incredible to see the ways that the campus would get involved and support efforts to make social change around sexual and intimate partner violence prevention. I think it would be pretty sad to find out that all that work wasn't really making a difference.

This is a good question. The research is mixed, with some studies showing an increased effectiveness of professionals. The review from 2005 by Anderson and Whiston about sexual violence prevention has a really good summary of this.It is in Psychology of Women Quarterly vol. 29. I think it likely depends and I think the problem is that we have so little evaluation research that we can't do much of these sort of fine tuned analyses to really test - does this program work better with peers or professionals - these are key questions for future evaluation.

I think there is pretty good consensus about single gender groups - at least for some aspects of sexual violence prevention. The Anderson article above also discusses that.

I can't speak related to the research (and my experiences are from the 1980's), but I think that Young Men oft times will listen most aptly to Peers who are also Male, though this can be a slippery slope. Peers - need to get respect across for those that they are trying to reach. My sense is that oft times the more distance young men perceive from themselves, the less likely they are to take things seriously. I also think that single gender groups can be helpful with men, while with mixed gender groups it often may be helpful for fishbowl or similar discussions and presentations that require the men to listen to the women - in the format. (My experiences were with Men Stopping Rape, Inc. in the 1980'[s a long time ago).

I was just reviewing the Anderson and Whiston (2005) article again. Their meta-analysis found disappointing results for peer education in that prevention using professionals showed bigger effects of the sexual assault prevention program. But again, we need more research here. In terms of gender - single gender groups in their analyses didn't seem important for men but did have an impact for some outcomes for women. So in some cases may be more important for women to be part of single gender groups.

In our focus group work we found that our participants in Bringing in the Bystander liked the single gender group focus but then wanted followup groups that were mixed gender.

My understanding of the research on peer educators is that the primary impact of being in a peer education program is on the peer educators. So, I think it depends on how you look at it - if you are saying that having a peer education program is 'not making a difference' because it has a low level of impact on the intended audience, that you are probably right for a lot of peer education programs (though I would think that the actual activities of the peer educators makes a difference).

However, I think you can also say that a peer education program (like other internship or service-learning programs) does a good job of developing an experienced and sustainable workforce for the anti-violence movement. I think of that as a successful outcome, and an appropriate outcome for educational institutions.

I think that what is difficult here is that we need more research - I think the answer is probably in the middle - peer education is important for some messages with some audiences and professional presenters may be important in others. I think this is where research-practitioner collaborations can be so key - how can we partner to evaluate the impact of programs delivered by peers or by professional staff. Part of what gets confounded is that the programs themselves are different so how to evaluate and compare peer programs and professionally delivered programs....

I see what you're saying. It seems that any one time an effort or awareness raising activity makes a difference for just one person, who then feels safe to share their experience or intervene with their friends is a worthwhile activity.

Related to Chad's (your) comment - which is good, it also seems vitally important in reaching men in general for them to hear a message multiple times until it sinks in. A particular - event - where men may listen to other men - By Itself - is really unlikely to have much of an effect. Where such men have other events which are affecting them, a workshop or similar may either be significant because it isn't their first exposure and it's helped reach them or it may be starting a process that may be effective with further exposure to the issue(s).

Being a peer educator for almost nine years, I saw many many many positive responses from classmates, professors, and the campus community as a whole. I agree that sometimes, the greatest impact of the peer education is on the peer educator, but if one or a few people ("professionals") are the only people presenting the information, I feel that sometimes the message is lost. I know that my greatest impact as a peer educator never came when I was standing in front of a class. It was when I was at the party or the bar, had someone recognize me from being in front of their class, and ask me a question. I had more than one person tell me that because I was there, it reminded them to watch out for their friends and not tolerate behaviors that were disrespectful. I think that the more people we have that are educated and educating, the better off we are. No one group is completely effective. Together, we are a force.

Yes - we need to keep finding room for doing prevention over time rather than just one time programs that our communities seem to wish would work. How do we find multiple opportunities. There is also the issue of readiness for change - it is likely that different tools, messages, and sources of the message will be important and will need to be different for people (men and women) and different stages of change.

For sharing your experience. It sounds like you are a force to be reckoned with. I love the idea that there is a whole community of active and engaged individuals ready to do this work and educate others about how they can get involved!

Thank you everyone for your questions and comments. The Live xCHANGE will be ending at 3:30 PM EST. Please continue the disucssion through April 15, 2011. During this time, the forum will not be a real time discussion but the forum will be open for questions, responses and comments. The NSVRC will respond daily to posts.

Change on our island has to 'look' like there's no change in order for people to buy in, people say they want change but the don't really, so working through existing infrastructure like church, schools, health system, cultural and government systems is the way to go.....as long as it's "safe" as in topics to handle, they'll chew on it.....to 'in your face' and they nod in agreement and change nothing...that's our island setting. Good thing we're a captive audience though, they can't go too far from one side of the island to another to 'hear' and see the same message. Looking forward to the 'bystander' approach because that's how traditionally we used to carry out our business, somewhere along the way we abdicated the bystander approach to everyone for themselves...this is an exciting time...Thank you..

Talofa (hi) Dr Banyard, over the past years, I find the hardest group to engage around 'multiple opportunities', community readiness and action are the actual people in the field on our island who insist on doing it the way the grantors and 'off-island' people think it should be done as 'they know best'. So there's training upon training, workshop upon workshop and I personally feel our island is 'workshopped out' but noone says it. It feeds into the evidence based, best practices approach but when it's not been tried or we've not gone back to explore our strengths rather then deficits, its a hard road to travel to say, we've been ok, look at what worked in the past, not so primitive after all....kind of dialog but no-one wants to enter into it until someone from "off-island" comes on island to tell us so...So you're all welcome to come to Samoa when you can. The challenge is making/turning those into presentable, palatable and marketable concepts for people to accept, they seem to want 'binders' and curriculums that then sit on their shelves and government offices around the island 'cause we can't relate to the 'spirit' by which it was designed in the first place. Thanks for letting me ramble...

Thanks for sharing your views. Yes - a big challenge is making curricula developed in one place really resonate in another. I also connected with your comment about what brings people to the table. I know in my own community I think there are ways that the bystander focus has really engaged and brought new people to the table. Best of luck with your work.

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